IoT Net Gets New Leader

SAN JOSE, Calif. – The LoRa Alliance will name Geoff Mulligan as its chairman effective August 1. The veteran communications engineer and evangelist said he wants to expand use of the group’s 900 MHz networking technology and promote interoperability broadly in the Internet of Things.

LoRa is one of a handful of emerging options for low cost, wide area IoT networks, competing with other 900 MHz nets including SigFox and Weightless-N (N-Wave). It also faces competition from lower cost versions of LTE and a 900 MHz variant of Wi-Fi on the road map.

“It’s important for us to get people to understand the LoRa technology itself because it’s easy to get confused with 802.15.4 or other narrowband WANs like Sigfox,” Mulligan told EE Times. “I’m chomping at the bit to get started,” he said.

Mulligan becomes the first chairman of LoRa from outside Semtech, the chip designer that formed the group earlier this year. The openness of the standard was a key criteria for taking the job, said Mulligan who has worked to spread a variety of Internet Protocol technologies, most recently 6LoWPAN as chairman of the IPSO Alliance.

“The LoRa protocol stack will be open-standards based – I’m an IP bigot, so it’s the only way I would come on board,” he said.

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